Development and application of bovine and porcine oligonucleotide arrays with protein-based annotation

The design of oligonucleotide sequences for the detection of gene expression in species with disparate volumes of genome and EST sequence information has been broadly studied. However, a congruous strategy has yet to emerge to allow the design of sensitive and specific gene expression detection probes. This study explores the use of a phylogenomic approach to align transcribed sequences to vertebrate protein sequences for the detection of gene families to design genomewide 70-mer oligonucleotide probe sequences for bovine and porcine. The bovine array contains 23,580 probes that target the transcripts of 16,341 genes, about 72 of the total number of bovine genes. The porcine array contains 19,980 probes targeting 15,204 genes, about 76 of the genes in the Ensembl annotation of the pig genome. An initial experiment using the bovine array demonstrates the specificity and sensitivity of the array.